


In the Sweet Way Back When

by telm_393



Category: Famous Blue Raincoat (Song)
Genre: F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Pining, Possible Character Death, Suicidal Ideation, Terminal Illnesses, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 05:06:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14763147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Last time I saw you...(Lee writes another letter.)





	In the Sweet Way Back When

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts).



> The illness that I tagged is AIDS-related.
> 
> Thank you to within_a_dream for betaing!

_Slow—_

_Slow—_

_Quick—_

_Quick—_

_Slow._

_Rickie and Jane dance._

_Lee cheers from the sidelines._

_They’re on fire._

_The crowd loves them, the judges love them._

_Lee loves them._

The music fades, and Lee wakes up. There’s jazz drifting through the window and just a second ago he was listening to an entirely different song.

He slips out of bed as quietly as he can, which is, at this point, very quiet, because Jane’s always been a light sleeper and Lee has been sleeping with Jane for years now.

He locks himself in the bathroom and loses minutes staring at himself in the mirror on another letter writing night. There’s tears on his face, already dry. It wasn’t a sad dream, but the funny thing about happy memories is that they become sadder the further you have to look back for them, and there’s heartache where the joy was back when they were all happy. Lee with his best friend, Jane with her dance partner, Rickie with that irrepressible magnetism of his...

Back then, Rickie was brand new every night, and Jane didn’t just teach the steps of the foxtrot and tango and Rumba, she _danced_.

Lee turns on the tap and sticks his head under the cold water to shock himself awake like he always used to when he was younger.

It reminds him of Rickie, of course.

+

Rickie’s smaller than him—a few inches taller but much slimmer, a dancer’s body. Having a dancer’s body means he’s stronger than Lee, though, and it’s easy for him to manhandle Lee into the bathroom and shove him into the shower. Rickie turns on the water. It’s fucking freezing, and Lee gasps and sputters as his shirt and sweatpants get soaked and the pills he was holding turn to clumps of wet dust on the shower floor.

“Why would you,” Lee starts, but he inhales water and has to cough it out. The coughs turn to sobs, and he falls to his knees on the wet tiles. “What the fuck, Rickie?”

When he looks at Rickie’s face, he sees big brown eyes that look like they’ve seen a ghost, righteous anger fading away to pure fear. “This isn’t you,” he says. “This isn’t you.”

“What?” Lee spits out. “I’m not supposed to be the crazy one?”

“You’re not supposed to die.”

Lee chokes out a laugh. “Everyone dies. Everybody knows that.”

“Not you, not now.”

“Jane’ll be fine with you.”

“This isn’t...Lee, this isn’t about Jane.”

“I was waiting for you to come back. So you could take care of her.”

_She can take care of you too, while you go._

“That’s not fair, Lee! That’s not fucking fair! You can’t just do that, you can’t just leave us behind!”

“You left us behind!” Lee says with all the venom in his voice that he’s been trying to hide ever since Rickie came around the other day. “You left us!”

“I had to, I’m...I’m not the same anymore, I can’t...”

“I just want you to stay.”

“You thought this would get me to stay?”

“You fucked her and you’re not going to stay?”

“I didn’t--not this time, we just--we haven’t, we just...She’s your wife!”

“She doesn’t have to be!”

“It’s her life, Lee. It’s her life, and she loves you. I’d never be enough. Without you, it’s never enough, especially with me…wasting.”

Lee ignores that last part, can’t take it.

_I have to pretend that you have time._

“But without you—”

“Without me, it’s fine.”

“When she came home, she looked happy. She always used to look happy when she came home from being with you.” Lee takes in a shaky breath. “How many times did you fuck? Every time?”

“Lee, I’m—”

“I don’t give a damn about your sorries, just tell me!”

“A few times. Not this time, not all the times, the last ones, I didn’t…we couldn’t go all the way, you know. I thought you knew.”

“Yeah, I knew,” Lee whispers. “Of course I knew. I could taste you on her. I can’t anymore, I miss it.”

Rickie’s kneeling on the floor too at this point, sprays of water making his clothes damp. Should’ve worn the raincoat.

He’s lost weight, and his sharp cheekbones look more painful than elegant. There’s gray in his loose dark curls, and Lee aches to touch him.

“If you’re just gonna leave again, leave.” Freezing water runs down Lee’s face and pools in his collarbone and it’s so cold that it’s easy for him to tell what’s water and what’s tears.

“You can’t leave,” Rickie says, and it throws Lee off even though Rickie never used to throw him off. Even the first time Jane came home smelling like him, he wasn’t thrown off, wasn’t even angry. He just let it be. Jane knew that he knew. “You can’t die.”

Right.

“It was just a moment,” Lee says through numb lips. “Just a moment.”

She looked untroubled and Lee thought that maybe, maybe if he got out of the way...

He couldn’t think of anything else to do, is the problem. He’s not the creative one.

“How can I believe that?”

“I’m not the liar between us.”

There weren’t even enough pills there to die.

Rickie’s crying, and he reaches out. He reaches out and into the thin crashing streams of water, and he pulls Lee close and sobs.

He was _never_ a crier.

Lee stares over Rickie’s shoulder at the mildew on the bathroom wall because he can think of nothing else to do. It’s been so long. Rickie’s rocking him back and forth and weeping into the crook of his neck and it has been so long.

This isn’t about Jane, is it?

It’s always about Jane.

But it’s about Lee too.

And it’s about Rickie.

It’s always, always about Rickie.

“Why do you have to leave us?” Lee asks, and his voice comes out broken. “Why do you have to leave us all over again? We’re happier with you.”

“I can’t, Lee. I destroy things. I destroy people, I destroy myself. I don’t want you to see me like this, I don’t want anything to happen to you or Jane by accident, I…I want more than I can have.”

_She got tested, she’s fine, we’re fine—_

“What makes you think you can’t have it?”

Rickie pulls back to look at Lee’s face, and he looks old and broken and Lee remembers how incredibly beautiful he was, way back when. It’s still there, the beauty, but it’s so much harder to see that Lee wants to turn back time to when it was easy. When Rickie was beautiful, things were easier. “What makes you think you know what I want?”

“You can have us...”

“No, I can’t. Not both of you. I know you, I know Jane, and I’m not meant for that life.”

“You make her happy. You make me happy.”

“All I’ve ever done is lose you both and let you down. Look at you. Do you think you’re happy right now?”

“Why can’t things change? This is just the first time you left all over again, this is—I can fix it, okay? I can fix this for you and for her. I was trying...”

Lee’s not made for leaving, is the thing. He went too far this time.

“No! Don’t you get it? There’s no fix when I’m in the picture. I’m the only one who can fix this. I come back and now _look at you._ I hurt one of you every time.”

“But you helped...”

“I’m not a cure, Lee,” Rickie says gently. “I’m just medicine.”

The pills Lee thought that maybe he’d take are gone down the drain. Suicide was never going to be his thing. He knew he was going to throw them up anyway.

He reaches up a shaking hand and turns the shower off.

He and Rickie sit on the wet floor for a very long time.

+

It’s four in the morning, the end of December, and Rickie’s been gone three years now. Last time Lee saw him, a few days after that incident in the shower, he looked so delicate and diminished and it was the day just after Jane came back from seeing him (Lee didn’t ask, already knew, didn’t mind, even though she came back like she always did, lighter, better, and he knew she’d just get sad again when Rickie left again, just like last time) with a lock of his hair, and Lee saw a tear at the shoulder of that stupid blue raincoat Rickie loved so much, the one Lee bought him for Christmas some million years ago, and Lee’s heart was so broken that he couldn’t breathe.

_“Did he seem sick?” Lee asks, the thick, loose black curl between them on the dinner table._

_“Well, yeah. He is sick.”_

_“Of course this is what he does, crawls off all alone to die.”_

_“He said he was going to the desert and going clear, he was gonna build a house.”_

_“What? Going clear, like Scientology?”_

_“Lee, I think we would’ve been able to tell if he joined a cult sometime between his last visit and now. Maybe he just liked the term?”_

_“Then what’d he mean by it? You’re the one who knows what he means.”_

_“No, I’m the one who knows how he moves.”_

_“Jane, what if he really meant he was going off to die all alone?”_

_“Don’t say that.”_

_“But what if he did?”_

_“I’m not saying that he didn’t. I’m just telling you to not say that.”_

Lee just wants to know if he’s better, wherever he is. If he did go clear, and, for the record, what the fuck he meant by that.

_(You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record._

Lee wonders if Rickie ever even made it to the desert. If he’s still there. If he did manage to build a house, which is really the most unbelievable part of the whole thing. Rickie was good with his hands, but not like that.

Rickie was the kind of guy to keep a record. Lee hopes he did, wonders if he’ll ever read it, if what Rickie said ever did happen. But he doesn’t look into it, doesn’t look for Rickie, and neither does Jane.

_Don’t say that.)_

The trouble in Jane’s eyes is coming back, and this time Lee thinks it really _will_ be there for good, and he wishes he’d asked, last time he saw Rickie, how he could take it away too, but maybe he was too afraid, and in that moment he could barely even meet his eyes anyway.

He’s certainly too afraid to try now, because one of those parts of him that _knows things_ knows that he’ll fail, and Lee doesn’t want to fail, because last time he failed the only thing that saved him was Rickie, and he can’t count on that anymore.

_I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you._

He guesses. He knows. He was just never one for overt displays of emotion.

Jane wraps his arms around his shoulders, rests her chin on his head.

They’re happy together, most of the time, in spite of it all. In spite of Rickie.

Depending on the day, the hour, the second, Lee thinks of it as _in spite_ of Rickie or _because_ of Rickie.

“Do you think he’s dead by now?” Jane asks, whispered words drifting into the spaces between them.

The question makes Lee feel cold. Jane’s never asked it before.

He almost says, a little spitefully, _Don’t say that._

Instead, he asks, “Do you?”

Jane’s quiet for a long time, long enough that Lee signs the letter.

 _If you ever come by here,_ he wrote. _If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me…_

_You don’t even know where we live._

_I don’t know where you are._

_I just want to see you again. I want to see if you’re better. I want you to be better. I want you to be ours again, selfish as that may be. I want you. We both do. My enemy, my brother, you were always in my way, and I’m glad for that, and I don’t know why. Don’t you remember what I always said? You’re going to be the death of me._

“Do you?” Lee asks again, because the question wasn’t rhetorical.

Jane presses a kiss to Lee’s hair before straightening up. She says, “He’s not coming back.”

That’s not an answer, but she goes back to their room before he can protest.

Lee wonders if she felt it in Rickie’s touch the last time they danced, the last time they fucked, the last time they saw each other in the train station, when Rickie turned to them and smiled, wonders if she felt the end of things like Lee did, if it was in that moment that she truly understood that the lock of his hair that she keeps in a velvet box was the last thing they would ever have of him.

She probably did, but it’s not really something Lee will ever ask. They don’t talk about Rickie that much.

It’s funny. Their connections with Rickie, they were never going to connect the three of them, and certainly not he and Jane. All of them in love, and all it it ever did was tear them to pieces and put them back together in different, tenuous combinations.

Lee puts the letter in an envelope and writes his address on it and then Rickie’s full name, and that’s where the charade ends.

There’s no post office that can deliver to wherever Rickie is now, so Lee puts the letter in the kitchen drawer, right along with all the others.


End file.
